I have been a fly on this wall for long enough. I am enjoying this thread a lot and thought I would put in my 2 cents.
I decided to look into other battery related articles written by Hannah Francis, and found one here:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/this-yoke-and-shell-battery-could-charge-your-phone-in-six-minutes-20150811-gix2vz#comments
It is about battery technology that could allow an iPhone battery to be fully charged within 6 minutes. Theory is nice, but ZERO math was applied to this article. The last person to comment on the article did some REAL math revealing the current involved in charging a battery that fast. It may be possible, but far from practical.
And a reminder to batteriser...
My concern with comment is not the math, they seems to be fine for me, but where does the "4 times 2500 mAh battery" come from?
And why speaking about 4 AA battery? this article is about charging a SMARTPHONE battery in 6 min, not replacing a NiMH battery, nor 4.
Based on Hannah's writing style of the above linked article, I would expect her to side with new technology along with little technical fact checking (if any). Also he made assumption that these battery will have a nominal voltage of 1.5V, but nothing tell that.
For example my iPhone 5s have a 5.92 Whr (1560 mAh) LiPo battery so the nominal voltage is 3.7V.
So taking the same calculation as him:
The battery is 1.56 Ah, T still be 6min, so 0.1h
I = C / T = 1.56 / 0.1 = 15.6 A + 10% = 15.6 * 1.10 = 17.16A (not sure about that, the main goal of this article and type of batterie is that the charging efficiency is really high, 10% of loss is quite high for me)
So for the 240VAC vs DC output, 3.7/240 * 17.16 = 0.26A or mure accurately, charging such a battery in 6min would need a 60W charger (or approaching).
But that's normal that quick charge need more power. But such a battery will also mean that in the same conditions as it is currently the charge your battery will be much quicker.
I've search with my friend google, and a LiPo charging efficiency seems to be about 60 to 70%
NiMH seems to be about 85%.
So I suspect that such batteries would be higher than 90%.
Anyway, even a 90% efficiency against a 60% efficiency is about a 50% improvement in charge speed.
(and sorry if I say something stupid, my head hurts today)